Hey guys, I just thought of a GREAT way to cut down the waiting time in the queue. I can’t believe nobody has thought of this before. Here’s how it goes:

When someone submits something that just doesn’t quite work, take a few seconds to explain why it doesn’t work. That way, the person knows and can work on correcting that exact problem INSTEAD of guessing and trying to fix something that was OK, then resubmitting to another rejection.

Novel idea, eh?

Say for instance someone was rejected due to:

“Unfortunately, we felt your submission was not appropriate as a stock audio file and
offers very little utility to our audience. We are therefore unable to accept this
particular submission into our library.”

So what exactly about the submission offers very little utility? For example sake, let’s say we have a cinematic hit with “extremely long reverb tail”. (3 minutes worth) So it gets rejected. But author has no clue why EXACTLY. So author thinks it’s the long reverb tail – seems reasonable; 3 minutes might be excessive. So author cuts down the tail to 10 seconds and resubmits. But wait, maybe it wasn’t the tail. Maybe there was another reason. Maybe it was the “Hit” itself. Something about it was off. So author gets second rejection. Maybe he’ll try a third submission with something else varied?

Wasting, wasting, wasting time…for reviewer, for author, for everyone in the queue.

Sorry to write so much. But reviewers, a small amount of direction could go a long way. The reviewers must have an idea why something is rejected, no? Then why not put that into words – if only a few?

(perhaps this isn’t totally applicable to music submissions I admit, but more towards sound effects)

AFAIK AJ is most picky and ‘selective’ stock for SFX. But you will learn what is needed and what’s not. Everyone had to do that and then you submit what the site wants:) And you must know that everything is subjective and rejection does not mean that your sound is poor or bad. Sometimes it may sell elsewhere pretty well. So do not cry on rejected whoosh, just do another one:)!

Don’t get me wrong guys (or gals if you’re a woman), I’m very happy to get rejected, truly! How else can I perfect my craft? If EVERYTHING was accepted without question, this marketplace would be messy and nearly worthless. I WANT rejections to see where I’m falling short. But when we’re given a canned response with little meaning, how does that help?

@D_Cooper: How long will it take the reviewer to download and review my next submission 100+ MB? The original was 36MB, but since I’ve no idea what was wrong, I will upload several variations of the effect. One of those will undoubtedly be what they were looking for and the rest can offer “utility” as a variation.

But why do that when a very simple. “It sounded great, but a 4 minute reverb tail is just too long for our customers. Sorry. Please cut it down and we’ll most likely accept it.”

Or “Too much bass in the car drive-by. Try rolling some off and resubmit. It might pass next time, but no guarantee.”

That took me 10 seconds to write each of those. Can they review 1 track a second D_Cooper?

I’ve had some reviewers actually write something like that I’m extremely grateful for their constructive criticism. It made my next submission all the better AND accepted. Truly a help and win-win situation for everyone. Guess I’m alone in this thinking.

As I mentioned, probably more to do with sound effects. They’re often very short and simple. Not nearly as complex as music. But brutal honesty would be fine…”Your track has too many issues for me to list in a short time. I would personally completely rework it. Your are more than welcome to submit a support ticket if you feel I’m in error.” Just a thought.

But I do feel that the reviewers must be professionals in their industry. If they have the skill set to accurately determine if an upload is unacceptable, one would think they would have the ability to succinctly describe the problem. Again, some reviewers have done this for me.

The fact of the matter is that authors keep growing and the reviewers do not. The only real remedy is to limit the amount that authors can upload in a time frame of say maybe 1 month. Maybe a different amount for music vs sound effects. I think at some point it has to happen.

fxprosound said
AFAIK AJ is most picky and ‘selective’ stock for SFX. But you will learn what is needed and what’s not. Everyone had to do that and then you submit what the site wants:) And you must know that everything is subjective and rejection does not mean that your sound is poor or bad. Sometimes it may sell elsewhere pretty well. So do not cry on rejected whoosh, just do another one:)!

Agreed. I think feedback of whether the sound “idea” or song “type” could be justified, but not specific responses for quality. There are plenty of resources (like top sellers, other libraries, youtube) that can help you better your sound instead of a reviewers specific recommendations. Compare your sounds to others and listen! Also if your sfx ideas are getting rejected, but you “don’t know why”, maybe some market demand research is in order

Yeah, I wholeheartedly agree. If someone is getting a lot of rejections, they certainly should do more research.

And perhaps I can change my stance a bit. Yes, for reasons of “quality” it may be difficult to explain fully (for music) and this idea may not work for that. For sound effects, it’s another story. (recording technique is flawed, too much background noise, sounds like a cheap mic, etc) any of these one-liners would easily help.

But what about “utility”? And for that matter, who are our “audience” as mentioned in the rejection? Don’t think I’ve seen any mention about that in the knowledge base. Might be good to let us know if we’re being judged by it, huh?

But back to utility. If we’re rejected on ‘lack of utility’ but find several or many others in the library just like ours, how does one take that? So the guessing game begins…then the re-submitting.

At any rate, on the soft-rejections I’ve had, every single reviewer has stated exactly why it was soft-rejected…and sometimes in detail. Would it be that difficult to do the same with hard rejections? How many hard rejections does AJ have in a day? Now there’s a number I’d really like to know. Can any reviewer clue us in on that one?